It’s the ultra processed food. https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/pdf/S1550-4131(19)30248...
Readit Newsbrezelnbitte commented on In Switzerland, most people rent for life nytimes.com/2023/11/06/re... · Posted by u/jbredeche
I bought a house in a walkable neighborhood. (It's in a rust belt city, so it's plenty affordable.) A mortgage puts your rent payment into something you own, instead of into someone else's pocket. When you pay it off, you're not spending $thousands per month just for a place to live. (That's where I'm at now.)
> When you pay it off, you're not spending $thousands per month just for a place to live.
Not everyone wants to live somewhere long enough to pay off a place though. It’s no different than other financial choices. The best decision for the individual isn’t always the most rational.
brezelnbitte commented on In Switzerland, most people rent for life nytimes.com/2023/11/06/re... · Posted by u/jbredeche
I'm American and I've never felt the appeal of homeownership. In fact for me the opposite has been true. I see it as something I want to avoid. I just don't see any of the upsides that so many people seem to.
It's unfortunate (for me) that owning a home is some key component of the American Dream. I see so many people who prioritize owning a home over everything else and it just doesn't make a ton of sense to me. The more people who see renting for life as a great option, the better our society would be, IMO.
Renting currently has disadvantages too (nothing's perfect), but I think a lot of people would have higher quality of life if they looked beyond home ownership. Think about all the people who claim they wish they didn't have to drive so much and how they wish they could walk more. They could easily do this if they hadn't bought a house in the suburbs! Rent a small apartment and walk wherever you want. It's great!
Another interesting article from the NYT on the topic of renting for life:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...
I’m with you on renting instead of buying. I owned a home until a divorce. It wasn’t for me. I had to develop a whole network of unreliable contractors, which was time-consuming and the repairs and repairs to fix bad repairs all added up. Then our property taxes doubled in a year, raising a mortgage quite a bit and would continue to rise. I didn’t want to stay there for 30 years and while it did go up in value, there really wasn’t much of a guarantee that owning it would lead to actually owning a house out right in the future. Seemed to me like I was renting from the bank instead of owning but responsible for all the costs of ownership. For me now the flexibility of renting is priceless. I can move around and not feel tied down by someone else’s dream.
brezelnbitte commented on Ask HN: How to be a manager? Any good sources for learning how to delegate? · Posted by u/r_singh
I consult internally in a large tech company on management among other org design and behavior topics.
I recommend Managing Humans and Bringing up the Boss. They are the most practical and useful day to day. Avoid Making of a Manager. It’s recommended often but it’s a memoir masquerading as a management book and way too focused on the writers specific situation.
Also get coffee with your HRBP. They are a wealth of knowledge and best to start the relationship before you really need them.
brezelnbitte commented on Cal Newport: Overstimulation Is Ruining Your Life mindmatters.ai/2023/09/ca... · Posted by u/momirlan
I find Cal Newport and the world around him very interesting. He's a CS computer geek that plays arm-chair psychologist in all his popular work. I've often wondered where his abilities breakdown and I think the article nails it:
"While there are many opinions and resources on how to best regulate overstimulation and overcome digital addictions, Newport’s directive is refreshingly simple: get rid of those things that are overstimulating you."
Really what this is saying is that there are many opinions and resources backed by research and psychological study that has complicated answers. And that Newport's solution is so simple is that it almost equates to "feeling depressed? Don't!"
So yeah, while Newport has interesting ideas and can boil things down for us techies to get behind (sometimes), he doesn't fully know what he's talking about. He's not really a trained psychologist and clearly doesn't understand things at a deep level. He's basically talking to people that are like him rather than people at large.
But where are the psychologists to supplant him? And this advice isn't that bad. It's similar to diet advice.
Diet is complicated so experts just say to restrict calories whether that's through reduced carbs, reduced fat or pretending to eat like a caveman.
In a similar vein, UPenn professor Angela Duckworth of "Grit" fame was caught misrepresenting statistics to embellish her claims a few years ago: https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/05/25/479172868/angela-.... Who knew psychology had such questionable science?
Its not just psychology. All science is affected. Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions describes cases from across many disciplines. The worst are cases of misconduct in medical research with maybe the worst case being Paolo Macchiarini who fooled the Karolinska Institute of Nobel fame into letting him experiment on patients with trachea replacement surgeries:
https://news.ki.se/the-macchiarini-case-timeline
brezelnbitte commented on Westfield Gives Up Downtown San Francisco Mall sfstandard.com/business/w... · Posted by u/g42gregory
Yeah, but NYC came back and so will SF. Detroit likely didn’t make a return because of its undesirable climate, but I’m hard-pressed to see a future where SF isn’t relevant in 50 years.
NYC was founded as and continues to be a financial capital, its where deals are done, so that strong anchor among its overall diversified economy helped. SF is somewhat similar to Detroit in that their economies are less diversified but weather and geography is a major advantage.
brezelnbitte commented on A novel about video games became a surprise best seller nytimes.com/2023/05/26/bo... · Posted by u/benbreen
This book was really disappointing. The characters were all underdeveloped, remaining angsty melodramatic teenagers until the end despite them all being adults. It also tries to deal with some heavy themes but fails due to the immature characters. There is a lot of exposition to keep the plot moving, which is simply bad writing. Show don’t tell!
brezelnbitte commented on When Will AI Take Your Job? unchartedterritories.toma... · Posted by u/JSeymourATL
There are plenty of students who can ace these exams but then utterly fail at getting things done at companies because they lack problem solving experience, a toleration for ambiguity or any number of interpersonal skills needed to complete complex projects. Until AI can just deal with other AI and not messy humans, there will be job security.
This is produced by same crew as the Half-Life doc. SecretTape who produced HL doc is the for-hire arm of NoClip.